I'm just trying to explain why Apple would do this to you, and it boils down to 'FireWire lost, and we (not you) can save money, space, and time by phasing it out'.
While I applaud your reasoning, as other have already said it looks like Apple just is trying to differentiate the Macbook and the Macbook pro lines. To accomplish this, they removed a feature on the cheaper notebook that most Mac users have grown familiar and intimate with to offset the cheaper price. They don't have to pay royalty fees to themselves, so it likely would have just costs pennies to add it to the hardware.
I winced a little bit when you said, "it sucks to be on the losing end of a standards war." While USB was likely trying to replace Firewire, Firewire was not trying to replace USB. If Apple would have been trying to do this with their standard, they would have at least released a Firewire mouse or Firewire printer somewhere.
I wonder how many of the people who say that are non-Mac users? There are a number of people (especially Mac users), who think that the ubiquity of Firewire is part of what makes a Mac a Mac. I can see a lot of pissed of customers in the future when they realize their hard drives won't work after opening the box.
Macworld has a long history. It has been around since about 1984 and has the largest audited circulation (both total and newsstand) of Macintosh-focused magazines in North America. If the name Macworld bugs you so much, you can always go to the sister PCWorld site I suppose.
That comparison is a bit outdated. E17 for all of it's rewrites is really turning into it's own desktop environment. People are writing applications for efl (Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) much like people write applications for gtk or qt. It doesn't rely on gnome to fill in missing functionality like it used to.
Quote from their page:
DR17 of the Enlightenment window manager represents an evolution into the next generation of desktop environments: the desktop shell. DR17 will provide integration between files and your environment in a seamless manner while encompassing a graphically rich and flexible architecture. It will not compete with GNOME or KDE, but be a completely new way of visualizing your desktop, based around the EFL which was built from the ground up for this task.
In other words, they're aiming for a Desktop Environment...but they are trying to be original.
You're just parroting the industrial designer's version of the geek fallacy that the best technology always wins. People buy iPods and iPhones because that brand is particularly popular and because music players let you carry thousands of songs in your pocket.
Saying that people buy something just because it is popular is not even attempting to search for a root reason. Mind you, the iPod popped up before Apple really became popular again.
A large part of the reason why the iPod gained the popularity it did was because the dang scroll-wheel thinger was fun and easy to use for average people. Their eyes would glow with delight when they touched it. It is/was the major gimmick of the iPod brand.
Average people (not geeks) tell other average people something is cool and and something then becomes popular. Apple now has a strong brand which helps secure the iPod as being popular. This is because brand names generally set a baseline expectation for quality.
Now mind you, geeks will complain about missing features. But it is those same features that would have kept the iPod from getting popular in the first place. They would have complicated a simple thing, destroying the glowing hypnotic eyes of average people.
My clients aren't paying me to spend extra time designing perfectly W3C-complaint sites, they are paying me to design a site that reaches real-world customers in as efficient a manner as possible.
With the direction that IE8 is taking, making a W3C-compliant site may actually be the way to "design a site that reaches real-world customers in as efficient a manner as possible." I understand why you do what you do, but don't miss the boat when it comes either. IE7 already has relatively good standards support.
It looks like the page is more about upgrading browsers rather than changing browsers (at least for now). The message is more akin to the gas attendant saying "Fix your muffle because it's a nuisance to other people on the road," and not "Get a new car!" The original poster said nothing about changing browsers either.
Thanks for the reply. It doesn't look like USB has a target disk mode from a quick google search. But it does looks like eSata will if it doesn't already. Apple may eventually plan to phase out Firewire for eSata for hard drives. Though if they were going to start doing that it would have been nice if it had appeared on this refresh of the laptops...
Actually, in many ways the Wii is the spiritual successor to the Nintendo. It has a lot more in common with the old Famicon and Nintendo than the other systems. If it was called the Nintendo 2, I wouldn't complain.
The reason I was pointing out the XBox specifically was because Microsoft set out to make an XBox v2, internally thought of it as the XBox 2, but then suddenly publicly christened it as the 360 for mostly silly reasons.
Nope. Steve figures if you can afford a camera with a firewire port you will spring for the MBP. You might piss and moan but in the end you will pull out the credit card. It's all about the money.
I think it's a general sign of Firewire disappearing from general consumer products. The first major sign that I noticed was the lack of easy backwards compatibility between Firewire 800 and Firewire 400. Now the port is disappearing from Apple computers too.
I wonder if Target Disk mode and such will be implemented for USB in Mac OS X? External hard drives were nice with Firewire because of how it in didn't burden the cpu like USB. But as with SCSI/ATA, chips are invented that offload the work from the CPU (sometimes diverging from the technology's spec to do so).
Microsoft is begging to differ with you. Again. They're going to call the successor to Vista, "Windows 7." Not "Windows 2009", not "Windows AB", not even "Windows VII".
Microsoft had some version-number-itis with the XBox because PS3 would be greater than Xbox2. It would have been much more interesting if they had named it Xbox 2006. Or maybe XpBox Vista Live Ultimate Edition and leverage on their other brands. Personally, 360 makes me feel like I'm back where I started instead of giving any impression of progress.
This is just like a golf membership. The main difference is that as part of that membership, the golf-club supplies the clubs you can use. In other words, you don't *own* the clubs. But you can still beat the crap out of another golfer to get their borrowed clubs. If you actually owned the clubs, doing that might be considered a felony or something...
Now, can we talk about former President Jimmy Carter's Community Reinvestment Act that precipitated the current economic meltdown?
Honestly, I think Bush Jr's karma is just catching up with him. He has had a long history of business failure, and the USA is just another bullet point on the list.
Thanks for the reply. Like I said, I really didn't look to far into things. I'll try a little harder.
Alright, from what I could tell, all of the Dell laptops include Vista which no choice for XP except for the 9 inch which included only Ubuntu. I understand you wanting to compare XP to Linux because you like the battery life, but it's a weird comparison because you're comparing ~6-year-old or so to modern. Newer OSes tend to require higher system requirements. You might as well as be comparing Windows XP to Windows Vista (which many people do!:-)). Strangely enough, it is apparently possible for Vista to get better battery performance than XP if Aero is turned completely off.
The Vista comparison on this page was interesting in that depending on the machine and usage, the results differed. It looks like Linux is in general beginning to snake ahead when idle. But when doing things it loses. There was also a link showing Fedora 8 barely beating XP when idle.
Having said all of that, I didn't say that Linux gets better battery performance than XP in real life performance. Given that OEM Windows tends to be specially configured for smart power usage on the laptops they are installed on, I wonder if the same thing will happen to OEM linux?
It sounds like Sony is creating the kind of community they want. With all of the hipsters around, all of the screenshots of the game in magazines look really rad.
Windows consistently gets longer life out of a battery. Simply compare the numbers for laptops that are offered with both Linux and Windows installed, or test for yourself.
Are you comparing Windows Vista to Linux or Windows XP to Linux? Which version of Windows do most laptops include by default nowadays? I googled Vista battery life and judging from the titles, it looked bleak. In fact one of the titles read "Slashdot | Linux Rescues Battery Life On Vista Notebooks From Dell".;-)
But seriously, I don't know enough to say anything educated. Searching something on Google only shows that those types of results exist for that string rather than showing anything conclusive.
You're asking why an iPod is better when likely the child does not yet (or likely ever will) know the words and phrases needed to describe things well enough.
But this could be a great chance to teach some critical thinking. In fact, give the child some material so she can answer you back. Since she is 9 years old, help her find some reviews on youtube. Try to make it an interesting activity.
I'm going to stray from the core conversation topic just a bit, so bear with me. There are cases where people may read or hear things about a something and figure out something generally better for them, but never really absorb the details. Keep in mind too that the kinds of recommendations different groups will hear will be fundamentally different. Nerds are much more likely to recommend hard to use products with features that will likely never be utilized by an average non-technical user. They are also much more likely to recommend products to other nerds. Average non-technical users will recommend what they like, but the description will usually be much more vague as to why. It just feels right. They are also much more likely to recommend products to other average non-technical users.
In fact, if it is at the websites discretion, why even have this at all? It seems like there is not just the potential for abuse, that is the only rational reason to include I can think of; that it is designed for abuse
That was my thought exactly. Even if this feature was designed so that websites are forced to ask for my permission, what are the chances that advertisements start asking every time they load? Any advertisement that I have seen that attempts to post my location in the text to get my attention is usually sleazy enough to make me uncomfortable willfully giving them the information in the first place.
After watching how Ron Paul and Alan Keys were both marginalized by selective non-reporting (despite Paul's recordbreaking fundraising and massive grassroots support), I have no trouble viewing McCain as a corporate pick (or the people's pick from the corporations' small set of approved options). Ditto Obama (and Clinton) vs. Kucinich.
Reminds me of the one CBS news story I saw on Ron Paul. The story was on one of *those* Los Vegas places where apparently the ladies where asking for donations for the campaign from the clients. Now I can't help but get the feeling that CBS purposefully went out to look for the one thing about about Ron Paul that would offend the most people, while at the same time avoiding any coverage that would give people any clue who the heck he is in the first place. Meh.
No prob. One of the fun things about making a long post that 6 different people respond to is the learning part. I'm happy the NES turned out the way it did too.
It might have been this picture or this picture that I had saw in Nintendo Power. They are likely both versions of the Nintendo Advanced Video System. It was prototype, so it didn't go on sale anywhere.
Encouraged by their success in Japan, Nintendo turned it's eye to America. Rather then try to sell in a market they were not familiar with, Nintendo attempted to negotiate a distribution deal with Atari. The Famicom was to be released under the name "Nintendo Enhanced Video System." However, the deal fell through. Later plans to release the console under the name "Nintendo Advanced Video System" never materialized. The Nintendo Advanced Video System was to include a keyboard, a cassette recorder, a joystick, and a BASIC cartridge.
Meh. I'm never going to find the original Nintendo Power article, but this is good enough.
You're right, thanks for pointing that out. I was searching for something and I misread the comparison. It's really bugging me that I can't find any references to do some fact checking against.
I'm going to quote part of the Wikipedia article for other people so they don't get lost.
The original version of the North American NES used a radically different design. The NES's color scheme was two different shades of gray, with black trim. The top-loading cartridge slot was replaced with a front-loading mechanism.
Emphasis mine. The side loader is commonly thought of by the general public as the original design, which is making this explanation difficult. Even Nintendo nowadays refers to it as the original. On top of that, the internet seems to have very little written about this topic either. Maybe "pre-NES" or "NES zero" would be a better term.
I think I originally stumbled on this information from an issue of Nintendo Power magazine where they even had a picture of the thing. I'm pretty sure it did go on sale, even if it was a limited scale, and it did flop. *sigh* If only I had some references. It was at least comforting that Wikipedia mentioned it, and it does help explain Nintendo's thought patterns at the time.
I didn't know about the different versions of the lock out chip, thanks. I left out the European market because of the Pal difference, and I am not sure exactly how it effects compatibility. The Vblank timing difference did weird things to games so that separate versions had to be released anyway? Or did the game makers just let their games run 2-3x slower? The NES in the US and Europe also had slightly different CPU speeds.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just trying to explain why Apple would do this to you, and it boils down to 'FireWire lost, and we (not you) can save money, space, and time by phasing it out'.
While I applaud your reasoning, as other have already said it looks like Apple just is trying to differentiate the Macbook and the Macbook pro lines. To accomplish this, they removed a feature on the cheaper notebook that most Mac users have grown familiar and intimate with to offset the cheaper price. They don't have to pay royalty fees to themselves, so it likely would have just costs pennies to add it to the hardware.
I winced a little bit when you said, "it sucks to be on the losing end of a standards war." While USB was likely trying to replace Firewire, Firewire was not trying to replace USB. If Apple would have been trying to do this with their standard, they would have at least released a Firewire mouse or Firewire printer somewhere.
My 2 cents anyway.
I wonder how many of the people who say that are non-Mac users? There are a number of people (especially Mac users), who think that the ubiquity of Firewire is part of what makes a Mac a Mac. I can see a lot of pissed of customers in the future when they realize their hard drives won't work after opening the box.
Macworld has a long history. It has been around since about 1984 and has the largest audited circulation (both total and newsstand) of Macintosh-focused magazines in North America. If the name Macworld bugs you so much, you can always go to the sister PCWorld site I suppose.
Quote from their page:
DR17 of the Enlightenment window manager represents an evolution into the next generation of desktop environments: the desktop shell. DR17 will provide integration between files and your environment in a seamless manner while encompassing a graphically rich and flexible architecture. It will not compete with GNOME or KDE, but be a completely new way of visualizing your desktop, based around the EFL which was built from the ground up for this task.
In other words, they're aiming for a Desktop Environment...but they are trying to be original.
You're just parroting the industrial designer's version of the geek fallacy that the best technology always wins. People buy iPods and iPhones because that brand is particularly popular and because music players let you carry thousands of songs in your pocket.
Saying that people buy something just because it is popular is not even attempting to search for a root reason. Mind you, the iPod popped up before Apple really became popular again.
A large part of the reason why the iPod gained the popularity it did was because the dang scroll-wheel thinger was fun and easy to use for average people. Their eyes would glow with delight when they touched it. It is/was the major gimmick of the iPod brand.
Average people (not geeks) tell other average people something is cool and and something then becomes popular. Apple now has a strong brand which helps secure the iPod as being popular. This is because brand names generally set a baseline expectation for quality.
Now mind you, geeks will complain about missing features. But it is those same features that would have kept the iPod from getting popular in the first place. They would have complicated a simple thing, destroying the glowing hypnotic eyes of average people.
My clients aren't paying me to spend extra time designing perfectly W3C-complaint sites, they are paying me to design a site that reaches real-world customers in as efficient a manner as possible.
With the direction that IE8 is taking, making a W3C-compliant site may actually be the way to "design a site that reaches real-world customers in as efficient a manner as possible." I understand why you do what you do, but don't miss the boat when it comes either. IE7 already has relatively good standards support.
It looks like the page is more about upgrading browsers rather than changing browsers (at least for now). The message is more akin to the gas attendant saying "Fix your muffle because it's a nuisance to other people on the road," and not "Get a new car!" The original poster said nothing about changing browsers either.
Thanks for the reply. It doesn't look like USB has a target disk mode from a quick google search. But it does looks like eSata will if it doesn't already. Apple may eventually plan to phase out Firewire for eSata for hard drives. Though if they were going to start doing that it would have been nice if it had appeared on this refresh of the laptops...
Actually, in many ways the Wii is the spiritual successor to the Nintendo. It has a lot more in common with the old Famicon and Nintendo than the other systems. If it was called the Nintendo 2, I wouldn't complain.
The reason I was pointing out the XBox specifically was because Microsoft set out to make an XBox v2, internally thought of it as the XBox 2, but then suddenly publicly christened it as the 360 for mostly silly reasons.
Nope. Steve figures if you can afford a camera with a firewire port you will spring for the MBP. You might piss and moan but in the end you will pull out the credit card. It's all about the money.
I think it's a general sign of Firewire disappearing from general consumer products. The first major sign that I noticed was the lack of easy backwards compatibility between Firewire 800 and Firewire 400. Now the port is disappearing from Apple computers too.
I wonder if Target Disk mode and such will be implemented for USB in Mac OS X? External hard drives were nice with Firewire because of how it in didn't burden the cpu like USB. But as with SCSI/ATA, chips are invented that offload the work from the CPU (sometimes diverging from the technology's spec to do so).
Meh.
Microsoft is begging to differ with you. Again. They're going to call the successor to Vista, "Windows 7." Not "Windows 2009", not "Windows AB", not even "Windows VII".
Microsoft had some version-number-itis with the XBox because PS3 would be greater than Xbox2. It would have been much more interesting if they had named it Xbox 2006. Or maybe XpBox Vista Live Ultimate Edition and leverage on their other brands. Personally, 360 makes me feel like I'm back where I started instead of giving any impression of progress.
This is just like a golf membership. The main difference is that as part of that membership, the golf-club supplies the clubs you can use. In other words, you don't *own* the clubs. But you can still beat the crap out of another golfer to get their borrowed clubs. If you actually owned the clubs, doing that might be considered a felony or something...
You mean the old compare and contrast thing?
Now, can we talk about former President Jimmy Carter's Community Reinvestment Act that precipitated the current economic meltdown?
Honestly, I think Bush Jr's karma is just catching up with him. He has had a long history of business failure, and the USA is just another bullet point on the list.
Thanks for the reply. Like I said, I really didn't look to far into things. I'll try a little harder.
Alright, from what I could tell, all of the Dell laptops include Vista which no choice for XP except for the 9 inch which included only Ubuntu. I understand you wanting to compare XP to Linux because you like the battery life, but it's a weird comparison because you're comparing ~6-year-old or so to modern. Newer OSes tend to require higher system requirements. You might as well as be comparing Windows XP to Windows Vista (which many people do! :-)). Strangely enough, it is apparently possible for Vista to get better battery performance than XP if Aero is turned completely off.
The Vista comparison on this page was interesting in that depending on the machine and usage, the results differed. It looks like Linux is in general beginning to snake ahead when idle. But when doing things it loses. There was also a link showing Fedora 8 barely beating XP when idle.
Having said all of that, I didn't say that Linux gets better battery performance than XP in real life performance. Given that OEM Windows tends to be specially configured for smart power usage on the laptops they are installed on, I wonder if the same thing will happen to OEM linux?
It sounds like Sony is creating the kind of community they want. With all of the hipsters around, all of the screenshots of the game in magazines look really rad.
Windows consistently gets longer life out of a battery. Simply compare the numbers for laptops that are offered with both Linux and Windows installed, or test for yourself.
Are you comparing Windows Vista to Linux or Windows XP to Linux? Which version of Windows do most laptops include by default nowadays? I googled Vista battery life and judging from the titles, it looked bleak. In fact one of the titles read "Slashdot | Linux Rescues Battery Life On Vista Notebooks From Dell". ;-)
But seriously, I don't know enough to say anything educated. Searching something on Google only shows that those types of results exist for that string rather than showing anything conclusive.
You're asking why an iPod is better when likely the child does not yet (or likely ever will) know the words and phrases needed to describe things well enough. But this could be a great chance to teach some critical thinking. In fact, give the child some material so she can answer you back. Since she is 9 years old, help her find some reviews on youtube. Try to make it an interesting activity.
I'm going to stray from the core conversation topic just a bit, so bear with me. There are cases where people may read or hear things about a something and figure out something generally better for them, but never really absorb the details. Keep in mind too that the kinds of recommendations different groups will hear will be fundamentally different. Nerds are much more likely to recommend hard to use products with features that will likely never be utilized by an average non-technical user. They are also much more likely to recommend products to other nerds. Average non-technical users will recommend what they like, but the description will usually be much more vague as to why. It just feels right. They are also much more likely to recommend products to other average non-technical users.
In fact, if it is at the websites discretion, why even have this at all? It seems like there is not just the potential for abuse, that is the only rational reason to include I can think of; that it is designed for abuse
That was my thought exactly. Even if this feature was designed so that websites are forced to ask for my permission, what are the chances that advertisements start asking every time they load? Any advertisement that I have seen that attempts to post my location in the text to get my attention is usually sleazy enough to make me uncomfortable willfully giving them the information in the first place.
After watching how Ron Paul and Alan Keys were both marginalized by selective non-reporting (despite Paul's recordbreaking fundraising and massive grassroots support), I have no trouble viewing McCain as a corporate pick (or the people's pick from the corporations' small set of approved options). Ditto Obama (and Clinton) vs. Kucinich.
Reminds me of the one CBS news story I saw on Ron Paul. The story was on one of *those* Los Vegas places where apparently the ladies where asking for donations for the campaign from the clients. Now I can't help but get the feeling that CBS purposefully went out to look for the one thing about about Ron Paul that would offend the most people, while at the same time avoiding any coverage that would give people any clue who the heck he is in the first place. Meh.
No prob. One of the fun things about making a long post that 6 different people respond to is the learning part. I'm happy the NES turned out the way it did too.
Encouraged by their success in Japan, Nintendo turned it's eye to America. Rather then try to sell in a market they were not familiar with, Nintendo attempted to negotiate a distribution deal with Atari. The Famicom was to be released under the name "Nintendo Enhanced Video System." However, the deal fell through. Later plans to release the console under the name "Nintendo Advanced Video System" never materialized. The Nintendo Advanced Video System was to include a keyboard, a cassette recorder, a joystick, and a BASIC cartridge.
Meh. I'm never going to find the original Nintendo Power article, but this is good enough.
You're right, thanks for pointing that out. I was searching for something and I misread the comparison. It's really bugging me that I can't find any references to do some fact checking against.
The original version of the North American NES used a radically different design. The NES's color scheme was two different shades of gray, with black trim. The top-loading cartridge slot was replaced with a front-loading mechanism.
Emphasis mine. The side loader is commonly thought of by the general public as the original design, which is making this explanation difficult. Even Nintendo nowadays refers to it as the original. On top of that, the internet seems to have very little written about this topic either. Maybe "pre-NES" or "NES zero" would be a better term.
I think I originally stumbled on this information from an issue of Nintendo Power magazine where they even had a picture of the thing. I'm pretty sure it did go on sale, even if it was a limited scale, and it did flop. *sigh* If only I had some references. It was at least comforting that Wikipedia mentioned it, and it does help explain Nintendo's thought patterns at the time.
I didn't know about the different versions of the lock out chip, thanks. I left out the European market because of the Pal difference, and I am not sure exactly how it effects compatibility. The Vblank timing difference did weird things to games so that separate versions had to be released anyway? Or did the game makers just let their games run 2-3x slower? The NES in the US and Europe also had slightly different CPU speeds.